Dear Mr. Watterson Page #6

I think he very quickly grew from

"let me get a package together

that a syndicate will pick up,"

to "gosh, I got picked up

and I'm gonna be syndicated,"

to, "now I have this opportunity

to kind of explore

these different artistic options."

But I think he quickly picked up

the opportunities with color

on Sundays, the ability

to push out the boundaries

on that piece of canvas

on the Sundays

and also, in the dailies,

he tried so many different things

in the dailies

as just from the perspective

of an artist.

- Cartoon art and comic art is

something that was originally seen

as kind of trashy, populist stuff,

almost very childish.

Then, as the years have gone on

people have started to see

the worth in it and that's because

comic strips have tackled

heavier subjects,

the artwork has been elevated

to a massive degree in some cases.

I don't understand the distinction

that people make.

You can have fine art, you can

have these amazing images

that people acknowledge

can speak about any topic

and say great things and reflect

what the artist is trying to do.

You can have literature that does

that too, you can have a great novel

that people respect

and they understand.

But, somehow if you combine

the words and the images

all of a sudden all you get

is something for kids,

and why is that?

If you read through

all of Calvin and Hobbes

you'll see that he really has

very interesting things to say

about society, about humanity,

about relationships, about the world,

and there's no reason why he can't

do that in a comic strip.

That's a perfectly valid form and

I'm thrilled that he chose that form

because I think he could

have done probably anything.

He could have been just a fine artist,

he could have written books,

but he actually chose

to do it as a comic strip

and I'm grateful to him for that

because he did it so well

and he showed how it could

really be done.

My favorite strip, which probably

doesn't surprise you,

is the one where Calvin and Hobbes

are looking at art

and they're talking about

comics versus art

and how you can have high art,

like a painting,

and then you have low art,

which is the comic strip

and it's commercial

and it's hack work.

And then he kind of shows

how absurd that is by saying

"a painting of a comic strip panel,

that's sophisticated irony,

philosophically challenging,

that's high art."

And so then Hobbes says,

"Well, suppose I draw a cartoon

of a painting of a comic strip?"

At that point it's just absurd,

but Calvin says, "Nope!

That's sophomoric,

it's intellectually sterile,

it's low art."

So he's commenting here

exactly on this debate.

What's high art?

What's low art?

And why just because it's printed in

a newspaper and it's a comic strip

is it automatically low art?

I don't think anybody would look

at Calvin and Hobbes

and say that it's not art

or say that it's low art.

But that seems to be a

distinction that comic strip art

has been stuck with.

Comics are self-expression.

Self-expression is art.

I don't give a --- about what

an art critic might say art is

because I know

that I'm creating something.

Art is about creating something.

The end.

If you actually still have

a subscription

you can probably tell newspapers

are hurting simply by stepping out

on your porch to get yours.

Nearly 100% of the time, it isn't

the front page that greets me,

but a full page ad for a

sports equipment retailer.

Then, the state of the perceived value

of the comics is clear

when you try to find

the comics section.

When I was growing up,

depending on how your paperboy

put together your paper,

the Sunday comics section was often

the front page of the Sunday newspaper

when it arrived at your door.

It was the first thing you saw.

Now, it takes me a couple minutes

just to locate it.

And looking back at comic sections

of the past in comparison,

it's clear just how much

the comics are being trimmed.

A typical Calvin and Hobbes

from the 1990's wouldn't even fit

in today's Sunday Funnies.

Watterson had more space

on the page than Stone Soup,

In the Bleachers,

Canderville, Frazz,

and half of Non-Sequitur combined.

The comics page was

shrinking in the 1980s.

It was getting smaller

and smaller and smaller

and cartoonists were rebelling.

It was getting tougher and tougher

to fit really quality content

into the strips.

- I typically avoided looking

at comic pages because I so hated

how mine looked on the page.

Your strips look so beautiful

as they head out.

You draw them this big,

and they're gorgeous

and you see them,

especially 25-30 years ago,

reproduced this big on bad newsprint

often out of alignment.

It was depressing.

It was like, why am I

in this business?

The smaller and smaller

reproductions meant there was

less chance for the visuals,

less chance to draw well,

less chance for the audience

to appreciate good drawing

and imaginative visuals.

If you are working to create

a graphic entity,

a pictorial representation

of something,

you don't want to see it

shrunk down to a postage stamp.

Some of the first comic strips

in America in the early 1900s,

some of those were like

full page comics,

and like, those artists had just

like huge palettes to work with.

And the art was really, really

important, whereas now, you know,

some people are working with,

like, this, and it's black and white,

and everything is

about the simplicity of it.

Clearly his focus was

on the Sundays.

So he approached the Sundays

as an opportunity to do

some dynamite art,

which in the comics has

been a dying thing for decades.

You almost cry a little when you look

at the old comics,

when they had a full page

to do whatever they wanted.

You know, again,

the Nemo in Slumberland.

I mean, good heavens,

it was just unreal.

- When you look at

the great strips of the past,

not only McCay and Herriman

and Milt Caniff and Walt Kelly,

the general standard of draftsmanship

used to be much higher.

You couldn't have

Terry and the Pirates

the same way you did

in the 30s and 40s.

The biggest, most popular

strips were the story strips.

They needed that space

to move the story along.

Well, as they shrunk the comic,

there wasn't that space anymore

for both the art and the dialogue.

Bill's particular problem was

that with the Sunday format,

it could be chopped up

to fit different sizes,

either a half page

or a third of a page

or a quarter of a page.

And he felt trying to configure

it so that it fit into all those sizes

was really an obstruction

for him.

So he came back with one size

proposal, and that was it.

- Once the Sundays were totally

in Watterson's control,

they didn't get moved around

or chopped up,

or they wouldn't lose the top bar.

That really opened up

a whole new world

in the sense that the artwork

could go to another level

because he was working

with a really huge palette,

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